Cosimo Alfarano: Well, also "Shouldn't social networking be a system service?" which remind me very much of the G+ idea

and "This isn't just a "moral" appeal, but strategic advice. The first provider to build a reasonably open, re-usable system service in any particular area is going to get the biggest uptake." which remind me very much of the technological hope I have in G+

Christopher R. Gabriel: But you can download several squares locally..

Cosimo Alfarano: I don't have a Android to test, but there will be a way, like select several destinations in order to cover the area of interest, assuming that the downloaded data will be saved permanently on the device.

Christopher R. Gabriel: Yes, this is exactly how it works. You can also see on the map all the offline available data you've downloaded.